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Title: The Possessed

or, The Devils

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Translator: Constance Garnett

Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8117]

Posting Date: August 13, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POSSESSED ***

Produced by David Moynihan, David Widger and Michelle Knight

THE POSSESSED

or, The Devils

A Novel In Three Parts

By Fyodor Dostoevsky

Translated From The Russian By Constance Garnett

1916

Contents

PART I.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY

CHAPTER II.

PRINCE HARRY. MATCHMAKING

CHAPTER III.

THE SINS OF OTHERS

CHAPTER IV.

THE CRIPPLE

CHAPTER V.

THE SUBTLE SERPENT

PART II.

CHAPTER I.

NIGHT

CHAPTER II.

NIGHT (continued)

CHAPTER III.

THE DUEL

CHAPTER IV.

ALL IN EXPECTATION

CHAPTER V.

ON THE EVE OF THE FETE

CHAPTER VI.

PYOTR STEPANOVITCH IS BUSY

A MEETING

CHAPTER VIII. IVAN THE TSAREVITCH

CHAPTER IX.

A RAID AT STEFAN TROFIMOVITCH'S

CHAPTER X.

FILIBUSTERS. A FATAL MORNING

PART III.

CHAPTER I.

THE FETE—FIRST PART

CHAPTER II.

THE END OF THE FETE

CHAPTER III.

A ROMANCE ENDED

CHAPTER IV.

THE LAST RESOLUTION

CHAPTER V.

A WANDERER

CHAPTER VI.

A BUSY NIGHT

CHAPTER VII.

STEPAN TROFIMOVITCH'S LAST WANDERING

CHAPTER VIII.

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER VII.

"Strike me dead, the track has vanished,

Well, what now? We've lost the way,

Demons have bewitched our horses,

Led us in the wilds astray.

"What a number! Whither drift they?

What's the mournful dirge they sing?

Do they hail a witch's marriage

Or a goblin's burying?"

A. PUSHKIN.

"And there was one herd of many swine feeding on this

mountain; and they besought him that he would suffer them to

enter into them. And he suffered them.

"Then went the devils out of the man and entered into the

swine; and the herd ran violently down a steep place into

the lake and were choked.

"When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and

went and told it in the city and in the country.

"Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus

and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed,

sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind;

and they were afraid."

LUKE, CH. VIII. 32-37.

PART I

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY

SOME DETAILS OF THE BIOGRAPHY OF THAT HIGHLY RESPECTED

GENTLEMAN STEPAN TROFIMOVITCH VERHOVENSKY.

IN UNDERTAKING to describe the recent and strange incidents in our town, till lately

wrapped in uneventful obscurity, I find myself forced in absence of literary skill to begin my

story rather far back, that is to say, with certain biographical details concerning that talented

and highly-esteemed gentleman, Stepan Trofimovitch Verhovensky. I trust that these details

may at least serve as an introduction, while my projected story itself will come later.

I will say at once that Stepan Trofimovitch had always filled a particular role among us, that

of the progressive patriot, so to say, and he was passionately fond of playing the part—so

much so that I really believe he could not have existed without it. Not that I would put him on

a level with an actor at a theatre, God forbid, for I really have a respect for him. This may all

have been the effect of habit, or rather, more exactly of a generous propensity he had from his

earliest years for indulging in an agreeable day-dream in which he figured as a picturesque

public character. He fondly loved, for instance, his position as a "persecuted" man and, so to

speak, an "exile." There is a sort of traditional glamour about those two little words that

fascinated him once for all and, exalting him gradually in his own opinion, raised him in the

course of years to a lofty pedestal very gratifying to vanity. In an English satire of the last

century, Gulliver, returning from the land of the Lilliputians where the people were only three

or four inches high, had grown so accustomed to consider himself a giant among them, that as

he walked along the streets of London he could not help crying out to carriages and passers-

by to be careful and get out of his way for fear he should crush them, imagining that they

were little and he was still a giant. He was laughed at and abused for it, and rough coachmen

even lashed at the giant with their whips. But was that just? What may not be done by habit?

Habit had brought Stepan Trofimovitch almost to the same position, but in a more innocent

and inoffensive form, if one may use such expressions, for he was a most excellent man.

I am even inclined to suppose that towards the end he had been entirely forgotten everywhere;

but still it cannot be said that his name had never been known. It is beyond question that he

had at one time belonged to a certain distinguished constellation of celebrated leaders of the

last generation, and at one time—though only for the briefest moment—his name was

pronounced by many hasty persons of that day almost as though it were on a level with the

names of Tchaadaev, of Byelinsky, of Granovsky, and of Herzen, who had only just begun to

write abroad. But Stepan Trofimovitch's activity ceased almost at the moment it began,

owing, so to say, to a "vortex of combined circumstances." And would you believe it? It

turned out afterwards that there had been no "vortex" and even no "circumstances," at least in

that connection. I only learned the other day to my intense amazement, though on the most

unimpeachable authority, that Stepan Trofimovitch had lived among us in our province not as

an "exile" as we were accustomed to believe, and had never even been under police

supervision at all. Such is the force of imagination! All his life he sincerely believed that in

certain spheres he was a constant cause of apprehension, that every step he took was watched

and noted, and that each one of the three governors who succeeded one another during twenty

years in our province came with special and uneasy ideas concerning him, which had, by

higher powers, been impressed upon each before everything else, on receiving the

appointment. Had anyone assured the honest man on the most irrefutable grounds that he had

nothing to be afraid of, he would certainly have been offended. Yet Stepan Trofimovitch was

a most intelligent and gifted man, even, so to say, a man of science, though indeed, in

science... well, in fact he had not done such great things in science. I believe indeed he had

done nothing at all. But that's very often the case, of course, with men of science among us in

Russia.

He came back from abroad and was brilliant in the capacity of lecturer at the university,

towards the end of the forties. He only had time to deliver a few lectures, I believe they were

about the Arabs; he maintained, too, a brilliant thesis on the political and Hanseatic

importance of the German town Hanau, of which there was promise in the epoch between

1413 and 1428, and on the special and obscure reasons why that promise was never fulfilled.

This dissertation was a cruel and skilful thrust at the Slavophils of the day, and at once made

him numerous and irreconcilable enemies among them. Later on—after he had lost his post as

lecturer, however—he published (by way of revenge, so to say, and to show them what a man

they had lost) in a progressive monthly review, which translated Dickens and advocated the

views of George Sand, the beginning of a very profound investigation into the causes, I

believe, of the extraordinary moral nobility of certain knights at a certain epoch or something

of that nature.

Some lofty and exceptionally noble idea was maintained in it, anyway. It was said afterwards

that the continuation was hurriedly forbidden and even that the progressive review had to

suffer for having printed the first part. That may very well have been so, for what was not

possible in those days? Though, in this case, it is more likely that there was nothing of the

kind, and that the author himself was too lazy to conclude his essay. He cut short his lectures

on the Arabs because, somehow and by some one (probably one of his reactionary enemies) a

letter had been seized giving an account of certain circumstances, in consequence of which

some one had demanded an explanation from him. I don't know whether the story is true, but

it was asserted that at the same time there was discovered in Petersburg a vast, unnatural, and

illegal conspiracy of thirty people which almost shook society to its foundations. It was said

that they were positively on the point of translating Fourier. As though of design a poem of

Stepan Trofimovitch's was seized in Moscow at that very time, though it had been written six

years before in Berlin in his earliest youth, and manuscript copies had been passed round a

circle consisting of two poetical amateurs and one student. This poem is lying now on my

table. No longer ago than last year I received a recent copy in his own handwriting from

Stepan Trofimovitch himself, signed by him, and bound in a splendid red leather binding. It is

not without poetic merit, however, and even a certain talent. It's strange, but in those days (or

to be more exact, in the thirties) people were constantly composing in that style. I find it

difficult to describe the subject, for I really do not understand it. It is some sort of an allegory

in lyrical-dramatic form, recalling the second part of Faust. The scene opens with a chorus of

women, followed by a chorus of men, then a chorus of incorporeal powers of some sort, and

at the end of all a chorus of spirits not yet living but very eager to come to life. All these

choruses sing about something very indefinite, for the most part about somebody's curse, but

with a tinge of the higher humour. But the scene is suddenly changed. There begins a sort of

"festival of life" at which even insects sing, a tortoise comes on the scene with certain

sacramental Latin words, and even, if I remember aright, a mineral sings about something that

is a quite inanimate object. In fact, they all sing continually, or if they converse, it is simply to

abuse one another vaguely, but again with a tinge of higher meaning. At last the scene is

changed again; a wilderness appears, and among the rocks there wanders a civilized young

man who picks and sucks certain herbs. Asked by a fairy why he sucks these herbs, he

answers that, conscious of a superfluity of life in himself, he seeks forgetfulness, and finds it

in the juice of these herbs, but that his great desire is to lose his reason at once (a desire

possibly superfluous). Then a youth of indescribable beauty rides in on a black steed, and an

immense multitude of all nations follow him. The youth represents death, for whom all the

peoples are yearning. And finally, in the last scene we are suddenly shown the Tower of

Babel, and certain athletes at last finish building it with a song of new hope, and when at

length they complete the topmost pinnacle, the lord (of Olympia, let us say) takes flight in a

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